ARMOUR Residential REIT, Inc. (ARR) Q2 2022 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the ARMOUR Residential REIT Second Quarter 202 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please also note today's event is being recorded. And at this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Jim Mountain, Chief Financial Officer. Sir, please go ahead.

Thank you, Jamie, and thank you all for joining our call to discuss ARMOUR's second quarter 2022 results. This morning, I am joined by ARMOUR's Co-CEOs, Scott Ulm and Jeff Zimmer; and our Chief Investment Officer, Mark Gruber. By now, everyone has access to ARMOUR's earnings release, which can be found on ARMOUR's website, www.armourreit.com. This conference call may contain statements that are not recitations of historical fact and, therefore, constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All such forward-looking statements are intended to be subject to the safe harbor protection provided by the reform act. Actual outcomes and results could differ materially from the outcomes and results expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. That would be due to the impact of many factors beyond the control of ARMOUR. Certain factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements are included in the Risk Factors section of ARMOUR's periodic reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Copies are available on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. All forward-looking statements included in this conference call are made only as of today's date and are subject to change without notice. We disclaim any obligation to update our forward-looking statements unless required to do so by law. Also, our discussion today may include reference to certain non-GAAP measures. A reconciliation of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measure is included in our earnings release, which can be found on ARMOUR's website. An online replay of this conference call will be available on ARMOUR's website shortly and will continue for 1 year. Net interest margin for the quarter was 2.22%, an increase of 44 basis points compared to Q1 2022. ARMOUR's Q2 comprehensive loss related to common stockholders was $96.2 million, which includes $58.6 million of GAAP net loss. Distributable earnings available to common shareholders was $31.2 million. That's up 16.8% from Q1. On a per-share basis, that represents $0.29 per common share. That non-GAAP measure excludes gains or losses from security sales and early termination of derivatives as well as market value adjustments, but it does include TBA drop income. ACM, the company's external manager, continues to voluntarily waive $1.95 million of its management fee, which offsets Q2 operating expenses. ARMOUR paid monthly common dividends of $0.10 per common share during the quarter and has announced dividends at that rate for July and August of 2022. Taken together with contractual dividends on the preferred stock, ARMOUR has made cumulative distributions to stockholders over $1.9 billion throughout its history. On the capital markets front, ARMOUR took advantage of the brief sell-off in Q2 to repurchase 248,000 shares of common stock at an average cost of $6.23 per share. The existing repurchase authority stands at just under 8 million shares, which will allow us to take advantage when and if future market dislocations present similarly compelling opportunities. The company also raised approximately $80 million worth of equity capital in Q2 by issuing 10.4 million shares of common stock at an average price of $7.65 per share through its at-the-market program. In July, the company raised an additional $28.5 million worth of equity capital with the issuance of about 4 million shares of common stock. Quarter-end book value was $7.25 per common share, down 10.7% from Q1 2022. Through the close of business on Tuesday, the 26th, we estimate that ARMOUR has picked up a nickel on book value at approximately $7.30 per common share. Liquidity remains strong at more than $650 million. At June 30, 2022, ARMOUR's portfolio consisted of $6.7 billion of agency securities plus TBA positions, representing another $700 million or so and $600 million, plus or minus, of U.S. treasury securities. With the sale of our DUS portfolio, ARMOUR's legacy available-for-sale portfolio now represents less than 4% of total specified pool positions. Now let me turn the call over to Co-Chief Executive Officer, Scott Ulm, who will discuss ARMOUR's portfolio position and current strategy in further detail. Scott?

Thanks, Jim. Historical sell-off at bond markets continued through the second quarter of 2022, as global central banks set on a path of aggressive tightening of financial conditions to fight rising rates of inflation. The 2-year treasury yield reached 3.45%, its highest level since 2007 and up from just 20 basis points only a year ago. The 10-year benchmark yield rose to just under 3.5%, surpassing 2018's high of 3.25% to break out of a multi-decade trend of lower yields. Rapid tightening of financial conditions did not avoid the housing finance sector where the potential mortgage rates surged to 6%, driving mortgage refinancing activity to the lowest level since the early 2000s. Historically, wide agency MBS spreads and discount coupons on nearly all existing mortgages presented an exceptionally attractive environment for our agency MBS portfolio strategy. Continuing with our Q1 strategy to redeploy risk back into the MBS market. During the second quarter, ARMOUR sold U.S. treasury bonds at lower-yielding assets totaling almost $4 billion to purchase newly issued MBS specified pools with levered yields ranging between 15% and 18%. The asset sales included our entire DUS portfolio of just under $1 billion, which was sold at rich levels in the face of a widening in credit spreads and rising worries of a recession. The sale also included $1 billion in lower coupon MBS pools with particularly slow prepay characteristics to take advantage of tight spreads and to pare down the portfolio risk for potential Fed sales in those coupons. We believe the Fed will exhibit particular care and caution in approaching the question of portfolio MBS sales, both in terms of the announcement timing and the sizing of potential sales as to not produce an outsized impact on the mortgage market. We hold approximately 20% of the total portfolio by market value in 2% to 3% coupon pools with faster turnover prepayment speeds collateral and very low negative convexity. At approximately 44% market value, our core portfolio holdings are in 3.5% and 4% coupon pools, which are shielded from both the risk of the Fed selling and of new origination supply. The remaining exposure is in MBS with 4.5% and 5% coupons, where nominal spreads are for a value proposition we haven't seen since the 2010, 2011 environment. As of the end of June, our net portfolio duration was 0.48 and our convexity was negative 0.91. This is indeed a great time to be an agency mortgage investor. Our overall reallocation of capital is reflected in a quarter-on-quarter increase in NIM by 44 basis points, a still historically low leverage of 7.6x as of the end of June and distributable earnings just slightly below our stated dividend amount. We estimate our earnings capacity to exceed the dividend of $0.30 for the third quarter and persisted least into the year-end. We anticipate that high volatility will produce many additional opportunities ahead. ARMOUR maintains a healthy amount of dry powder of over $700 million in U.S. treasury notes, capacity for at least 1 turn of additional leverage and ample excess liquidity. Despite rapidly rising rates, 104% of our repo book as of the end of June is hedged with current and forward starting swaps, which reset daily. This allows us to be relatively agnostic to sizing and timing of Fed moves which have been extremely unpredictable this year. ARMOUR continues to monitor the term structure in the repo market. But for now, we prefer to keep our MBS term repo a bump or shorter. As of 6/30, it stood at 22 days with an average rate of 137 basis points. We continue to believe that our current dividend rate is appropriate for current conditions and gains further support from the investment opportunities available. Thank you very much. We'd now like to open up for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question today comes from Doug Harter from Credit Suisse.

Can you talk about where you see incremental returns on new investments today? And then, I guess, if you were to truly mark-to-market kind of the entire portfolio from a return perspective would the returns be kind of comparable to that?

Sure. I'll defer to Mark Gruber, Chief Investment Officer. Mark?

Sure. Thanks, Doug. So right now, we see asset yields, levered yields somewhere in the mid-teens, so 14% to 16% yields, on new investment opportunities. And like I said in -- Scott had said, we turned over the portfolio pretty -- quite a bit over the last few months. And we think the return profile of the whole company, the whole portfolio is going to be somewhere in the low to mid-teens also. Like Scott also said in his remarks, we think our earnings capacity is higher than where it's been over the last 6 to 9 months.

I mean I guess just on the dividend with that construct, right? If I take the current dividend over the current book value, that gets me something in the 16% range. And if you're saying that that's -- you have to earn that sort of after expenses. Just if you're saying returns are in the 14% range. Just curious around the commentary that -- around the sustainability of the dividend.

This is Jeffrey. So the dividend is very sustainable here. Make special note of the fact that the amortization expense that we currently have, Doug, is very low. The prepayments that our portfolio is exhibiting now are the lowest they've been since we started the company, particularly by the -- 2 reasons, higher mortgage rates of near 6% means that prepayments on existing portfolio attributes are very low. It also means because over 90% of our portfolio is specified assets that we pay a premium over TBAs to identify characteristics that will keep prepayments slow. So if you get faster prepayments, then you can have a situation where you're not being able to support the $0.30 dividend. I think Scott was very clear in his comments that we feel in the foreseeable future that the portfolio after expenses will support a $0.30 dividend per quarter. I hope that's helpful.

Our next question comes from Trevor Cranston from JMP Securities.

Can you talk about how you guys are thinking about the risk of any potential further spread widening from here? And kind of what you guys are looking for to maybe be a little more aggressive in terms of taking leverage up to a higher level?

So once again, Scott also commented in his prepared remarks that we believe it's low likely at this point that the Federal Reserve is going to sell mortgages and create a big spread wider. Now we've protected ourselves specifically by reducing exposure to those coupons that the Federal Reserve owns. So should they be selling, we have very low exposure to that spread widening risk now. However, if the season -- the ocean -- the tide goes down, all those go down a little bit, and we do understand that. So for right now, we have -- we're one turn under where our actual historic [ mid-leverage ] had been. And when we see assets that we think have good longer-term attributes, we'll go ahead and buy them. We do have a big slug of treasuries and the treasury position as well can be turned into mortgages. So we have 2 ways to go ahead and increase our exposure to spread, but we're just being very cautious and careful here. Understanding, of course, that we are supporting, and we expect to be supporting our dividend for at least a foreseeable couple of quarters. So we will not see a reason to go ahead and extend ourselves. I hope that answers your question.

Okay. Yes, it does. And in terms of the -- as you guys are buying new securities in the spec market, can you talk about how much premium you're paying for prepaid-protected pools at this point?

Sure. And I'll hand it back over to Mark to give you some details on that. And before he starts, I will tell you, we're being very cautious about that because in March and April 2020, a lot of those premiums disappeared and it was painful for owners of mortgages. So Mark, do you want to give a little more specifics on some of those attributes?

Yes. So most of the spec tools we buy have pay-ups by 0.5 a point or under. And specifically, the reason is because of what Jeff just said is that prepaid volatility was kind of extreme a few years ago. So we've kept our pay-ups pretty low. Now we're also trying to find assets that have the right convexity characteristics. So there are cases when we'll pay more than that for really good assets. But I would say 0.5 a point and under is where we try to keep it.

And our next question comes from Matthew Howlett from B. Riley.

Just on hedging, I mean, with the curve inverted, Jeff, I know you've seen a lot of flat inverted yield curves over your time. Do you think about taking out the hedging longer? And there's been some talk or some forecast [ possibly ] the Fed cutting next year? Just talk a little bit about how you look at hedging today.

So if we get to a point where we actually think the Fed is going to be cutting or even perhaps a little bit before that, we may adjust. But let's walk through this. So about close to 100% of our portfolio is hedged with paid fixed received floating. A lot of that paid fixed is low single digits that we put on in 2020. So we're paying low amounts, and we're receiving in the 200s now right as the Federal Reserve raises the short-term rates. For the foreseeable future, we could see short-term rates of -- federal funds rate going up another 150 basis points before they take a deep breath and take a look at things. And we'd be a net receiver of those against the increase that we would equally have on our repo book. So for right now, we're going to keep that hedge position in. It helps earnings. And the way we have it set up is across the curve. So a little conversion or a little steepening doesn't really play in our book value as much as it might think. In that regard, we're doing some work earlier in the year. So think about this, the 2-year note in Q2, moved an average base daily basis point of 7 basis points. So every single day, on average, it moves 7 basis points. For the last 20 years, it moved 3.4% on average. So we got a lot of moving around. That's why Mark and his team have been very good about hedging across the curve. In that same respect, the tenure during the second quarter moved an average of 7.1 basis points in yield. But over the last 20 years, it was 4.4. So once again, not quite doubled, but certainly near that. So that was the mountain that we were fighting on the uphill battle against. And I think they've done a very, very good job about that. So I hope that addresses your question.

Yes, it does. And then I guess last question on just on the topic of just capital. I mean the stocks held up, it's above book here, and you look at the preferred markets, I know you don't have a crystal ball, but what do you think all the preferreds to the mortgage rates are trading below it. It's sort of -- to me, as you outlined on your statements, it's one of the best environments you've seen in a while. Any sense on when the preferred market would open up? And would you access that? It looks like your capital -- you have room to add some preferred in the capital structure?

We spent every quarter on this very subject. Let's take a look at it right now. When the 10-year note was trading at 1.25% to 2%, it would make sense that 6.5%, 7%, 7.25% coupon preferreds would be trading at or around their $25 par. 10-year worked its way up to 2.75% to 3.50%, you can see that just anomaly that return is not enough to compete with risk-free treasuries. So in our opinion, the preferreds are trading more or less where they make sense. Now there's 2 ways to look at what you could do with your preferreds at this point. You could buy some back at $21 a share. And I believe the float for all of our peers in -- whether it's a 6.5% or have coupon, they all seem to be trading $20 to $21.5. It's not as accretive to book value as you would think. Now the real yields on those are like $8.25 to $8.75 because they're trading under par, but Mark and his team can invest at 12%, 14%, 16%, maybe even 18% right now. So we have better investment opportunities in our primary asset class of agency mortgages rather than buying back the preferred. So what you commented on was that you thought we had a good balance between preferreds currently and the amount of common equity that we have outstanding. We agree with that 100%. Preferred start trading above par again, if our common equity is larger, we might look at issuing those, but that's not something that we're interested in doing right now for all the reasons I just mentioned.

Right. Yield at 7%, I think, on the current preferred, would you -- with the returns available today, would you issue at 7.5%, 8% if that was tight a little bit and open up, would it make sense? Or it looks like it would be accretive where you mentioned returns are for agency.

I think it's unlikely at this point we'd be issuing any coupons above where our current outstanding issue is. Once again, if we traded up to our par again and we felt we wanted to access the capital markets in that fashion, we'd probably increase the size of that issue. I will remind you that twice in our history, we bought issues out, we bought all the As back, bought all the Bs, it was a large issue too, bought all the Bs back. And so we'll see what the future presents itself, but we're actively used that class equity structure actively as part of the way we run our company. And yes, I really appreciate the question because not enough people understand the value of having an optionality.

Yes. It just looks like they're at incredible discounts today. But thanks for color that really helps.

Our next question comes from Christopher Nolan from Ladenburg Thalmann.

Most of my questions have been asked. On your -- just a clarification on your earlier comments in terms of the earnings run rate given the shift into the higher-yielding agencies. Should we be expecting the management fee waiver to decline in the second half of the year?

So that -- I haven't discussed that with the Board of Directors this week. But our opinion, I think, globally would be that it would more or less stay where it is right now.

Great. And then in case I missed it, what is the leverage level of the portfolio as of July 26.

I think we can release that information. Mark, can you take that off the recent report? There's 2 ways to look at it, there's absolute debt to equity and then there's implied. We do have a small $300 million or $400 million rollout. Mark, can you help on that?

Yes. I mean it's going to be in the mid-7s right now.

And ladies and gentlemen, at this point I'm showing no additional questions, I'd like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.

Well, we thank you all for joining us today...

Thanks for joining us today. Take it away Scott...

Thanks for joining us today. We appreciate your time, and we're always available to you guys ringing the office. Thanks.

And ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call and presentation. We do thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.